The Offenders: The Sinister Six, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. Every couple of years it gets raised that the superhero bubble has to burst soon. It's now been decades since X-Men marked the start of the modern superhero genre and like the western before, its critics have been waiting for audiences to find a new shiny thing. And yet whenever these concerns are raised a film comes along that shows there's plenty of places for the genre to go. The Avengers, with its witty interchanges and complete understanding of what made these characters work in the comics, brought together Marvel's heroes in brilliant form, knocking the socks of genre doubters by showing the scope these films could have. And then every other film decided instead of increasing breadth they'd just try and capture the same magic. Suddenly the central concept of superheroes shifted to being massive universes of interconnected, ever-building stories. Marvel had been doing this since Iron Man, but it was only when we got to see the pay-off four years later that other studios realised what was going on. Cue a rush to get other properties their big team-ups; D.C. and Warner are trying to get a Justice League film to work, while Sony have suddenly become a lot more interested in bringing together Spider-Man's villains than about the journey of Peter Parker himself.
